If so, should I edit all my posts/comments and update them to generic hosting links?
I’ll use postimages.org in the future to prevent something like this from happening again.
well, my instance makes a local copy of posted images… so when i moved bertstrips it uses my local copy of those images.
i guess it depends on where your communities end up
Jesus, so much to unpack there. I love it.
Shouldn’t they be federated permanently with other instances?
No. If you look at the URL of any meme community, its hosted on the instance of the OP, not your instance.
Yea but the posts still exist on any other instance that was federated with OPs, right?
The post will remain, but the image would be gone.
Let me give you an example. I’m gonna attach an image in this comment, I want you to see this comment, acknowledge seeing it, then I’ll go to my profile and delete the image without deleting this comment, and you can check what happens when I delete the image.
Okay!
Okay so I found an older comment which I deleted the image, take a look: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18929187
If you click “view source” button below the comment, you’ll see the url, but if you open anothet tab to try to see it, it will show an error.
That’s what images will look like if an instance shuts down.
Hmm that’s weird. I deleted the image and I can still see it. Maybe bookmark the comment check back later, I don’t think the “delete” action is instantaneous.
Anyways, if you open the image, you’ll see that its hosted on sh.itjust.works, which means your instance does not keep a copy of it.
So I want you to think: What do you think happens to the image if, hypothetically, my instance sh.itjust.works shuts down?
When you open the image, your webpage is still gonna attempt to find the image from the url, and since sh.itjust.works is gone, there is no way for there to be an image.
But anyways you can check later and perhaps the delete action finishes.
I would say use ai to generate you a script that download all the images in the instance
